Pandering Labyrinth

At the beginning of last year, Contagious—a company that “helps agencies and brands supercharge their marketing” and “believes that creativity kicks the living crap out of non-creative work when it comes to selling stuff”—published a piece proclaiming that “‘eat the rich’ will be the dominant creative narrative of 2023.” What read like a standard-issue trend piece in the era of Succession (2018–23), Parasite (2019), Triangle of Sadness (2022), and The Menu (2022) was actually a guide to capitalizing on a booming anticapitalist macronarrative. Author Tom Beckman, global chief creative officer of the marketing communications firm Weber Shandwick, urged brands in the direction of “a post-bourgeoisie playbook for the 99 percent [and] an entirely new and very gritty brand voice we haven’t seen before.” In an era defined by soaring inequality and diminishing social mobility, “people and brands,” Beckman declared, “will celebrate social realism.”

A fun-house take on a social realist mural welcomes guests to Life and Trust, “a tale of money, sex, and power in the Financial District” and the newest prodigal play(ground) from commercial theater producer Emursive. (Sleep No More, the company’s aeonian scavenger hunt for the plot of Macbeth, promises to finally get some shut-eye in early October.) Spreading across one hundred thousand square feet and six floors of Cross & Cross’s cautiously deco 20 Exchange Place, the 1931 City Bank–Farmers Trust headquarters turned luxury condo tower, Life and Trust occupies Wall Street with craft cocktails and prebatched bromides. The legend of Faust, retold as the boom-and-bust chronicle of a fictitious Gilded Age robber baron, here offers the pretext for a grandiose work of anticorporate autosarcophagy, prurient and preachy in equal measure. Featuring laboring bodies in the burnished-steel style fashionable in the time of FDR, Holger Cahill, and the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project, the fresco is the centerpiece of Conwell Coffee Hall, a resplendent viral marketing Trojan horse for the production. It opened, frothing FiDi lattes and stirring media interest, months before Life and Trust.

At the heart of the striking faux-FAP mural by Eric Diehl, an imposing rendering of 20 Exchange Place ghoulishly lords over the masses—both those in the painting, caught in a maelstrom of industry, and those in attendance, hobnobbing over mini quiches and sipping spiritous “Devil’s Dummies.” The edifice-centric mural just within the edifice emulates the auto-logic of site-specific theater and nods toward Life and Trust’s critique of corporate rapacity from within the belly of the beast. (The play is directed by Teddy Goodman of Woodshed Collective, a company “driven by the belief in the combined power of stories and architecture to break down the barriers of everyday life.”) In giving preeminence to the façade we’ve just penetrated, the mural also unwittingly foreshadows the shallowness of what’s to come, no matter how deep we’re sent into the building’s historic bowels. (On the subject of bowels: a disclosure that my first unpaid gig in New York entailed calling cues and concocting simulacral stool—in fact, mashed potato mix and cocoa powder—for Woodshed Collective’s 2011 adaptation of Roland Topor’s The Tenant in the West-Park Presbyterian Church.)

The architecture of 20 Exchange Place is a case study in poetic self-reflexivity. Initially designed to rise to seventy-one stories, it would have been the tallest office building in lower Manhattan had it not been for the Wall Street crash of 1929—a crisis traceable in part to the reckless greed of Charles E. Mitchell, president of National City Bank, whose merger with the Farmers’ Loan and Trust Company the skyscraper was built to house. In the end, the consolidated bankers settled for fifty-seven stories and a limestone crown in lieu of the giant electric globe that was to have topped the high-rise. (It did, with its Mohegan Granite and Alabama Rockwood Limestone façade, enjoy a monthslong stint as the world’s tallest stone building.) Famously, its first setback, on the nineteenth floor, boasts fourteen Pez-dispenser gargoyles named the “giants of finance”—seven smiling, seven frowning, so clairvoyantly signifying the volatility of the market. (Their expressive evocation of comedy and tragedy masks likewise now seems prophetic: of how, just below, there’d someday be a behemoth work of theater all about it.)

After Citibank sold the building in the ’80s, it was mostly vacant until it underwent a phased transformation into luxury condos in the early 2000s, with one-bedroom apartments now priced at $5,780. In 2022, the tower went viral when its elevators began to malfunction, stranding residents with a 57-floor walkup and earning the building the name “high-rise hell.” In the city’s second most expensive per-unit deal this year, announced days after Life and Trust’s opening, 20 Exchange Place was sold in a joint venture to the upmarket developer Dermot and the Dutch pension fund manager PGGM, the former planning to offer residents something called “Dermot Ignite… a lifestyle and social program aiming to spur resident connection and engagement that will include access to curated events, wellness programs, networking opportunities and other exclusive benefits.” Like the gamified spectacle that traverses the building’s lower register—in which performers occasionally sidle up to an audience member and treat them to what in immersive theater parlance is swooningly known as the ‘one-on-one’—this condescending posthuman vision assumes a clientele so removed from embodied presence that the ‘experiential’ becomes a commodified attraction. Step right up and behold: an in-the-flesh person in space!

Life and Trust’s ruse begins with a confirmation email that directs ticket holders not to 20 Exchange Place but to “Conwell Tower,” whose entrance turns out to be a postern at 69 Beaver Street. Approached from this hornier side address, the bank lobby turned beanery impresses in its original detail: tentacled chandeliers, skyscraper pendants hanging louchely from mesmeric radial canopies, girthy pilasters and columns showing marble skin. Diehl’s mural, meanwhile, explodes the building’s notable adornments, such as David Evans’s bronze, allegorical bas-reliefs flanking the primary entrance on Exchange Place, into an arcane symbology. Recreated here, they announce in their handsome hermeticism Life and Trust’s Dan Brown–ish intrigues. Besuited actors snake around café tables and tastefully distressed chesterfields, informing guests that a certain Mr. Conwell “can’t wait to meet” us (in hopes we’ll invest in the show’s eponymous bank), all while locking our phones into little neck-dangling travel wallets that challenge immersion (and the show’s cloak-and-dagger erotics) by making everyone look like a vacationing dad.

After being shuffled into a portentous room, we finally meet the mysterious J. G. Conwell, as well as his assistant, who is in fact Mephistopheles’s minion. The banker and the imp-tern share a brief exchange—the night’s only lines of dialogue—which clarifies the stakes of the story: The Roaring Twenties tycoon, like the good Doctor Faustus before him, was, long ago, seduced by dark magic. Our Mephisto, a traveling illusionist, preyed on the callow upstart’s love for his severely ill sister, offering him the recipe for a potent opiate syrup (“to cure pain”) in exchange for his soul’s eventual resting place in ten thousand hells. Steampunk Sackler agreed, and the gold coins piled into the wealth that founded the bank in which we stand. Now, on the eve of the market crash on October 24, 1929, Mephisto has come to collect. “We’re all capitalists here, Mr. Conwell…everything has its price,” the sinister subordinate tells him. But because Mephisto is a magnanimous demon, Conwell gets to take a final sensual rumspringa through his past.

Audiences, too, must sign a deal with the devil. “In order to enter a world of visions, become an illusion yourself,” entices the assistant, before popping open a briefcase containing our collective punishment: antlered, black plastic masks, perhaps an all-too-fitting allusion to the classic symbol of cuckoldry and general humiliation that makes an appearance in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. The first night I attended, the group of other recyclable stags I was corralled with was sent down an elevator to the understory of the experience. We were spat out in the late nineteenth century, where two gold miners in a pub were throwing each other balletically across tables in choreography by sibling dancemakers Jeff and Rick Kuperman (of Broadway’s The Outsiders [2023], cinema’s Dicks: The Musical [2023], and Phish at Madison Square Garden [2017]). These swells of lyricism, too often withheld between more prosaic pantomime, felt like small gifts. According to the New York Times, the script by writer Jon Ronson “was initially text heavy” but “nearly all of that text was removed, in favor of a movement-based work with constant underscoring.” If the production had committed either to an abstract and emotive form of dance, or to Ronson’s textual storytelling, perhaps it would have treated its skilled performers less like hot and bothered human furniture.

Ronson, who cowrote Okja (2017) with anticapitalist auteur Bong Joon-Ho, is perhaps best known for his reporting on the fringes of the American culture wars and conspiracy theory. Whether in his 2001 book Them: Adventures with Extremists or his current BBC podcast, Things Fell Apart, he narrativizes the fraying of a shared reality that sends people scrambling for stories to explain their sense of helplessness. Perhaps drawing a parallel between such trapdoors out of reality and the choose-your-own-adventure style of ambulatory theater, Emursive in 2019 enlisted Ronson to pen a performance themed around the six floors of empty bank space it had just leased.

Indeed, Life and Trust recreates this psychology of imaginative distrust, harnessing the sphinxlike and unresolved nature of the form to imply that anyone might be up to no good—even you. Like the gumshoe conspiracists who find in the mess of the internet constellations of nefarious, ordered intent, the audience of Life and Trust is doomed to chase after an infinity of speculative depravities potentially encrypted in any shadowy NPC or old-timey bauble—even when actual evil is in plain sight. On the nose as it is, the centrality of a Sackler-like malefactor points to the fact that there are real, visible figures with disproportionate control over our lives. As Ben Davis wrote in a two-part essay in Artnet News on conspiratorial aesthetics, “Conspiracy theory gains plausibility as the gulf between the outward rhetoric of politics and the felt reality of how institutions actually function grows; antique national narratives about an ‘American Dream’ seem to be doublespeak covering over some deeper and malicious reality; the fantasy space is thus ripe to fill up with all kinds of dark images.”

“All kinds of dark images” are evoked in Gabriel Hainer Evansohn’s feat and feast of scenic design, a Daedalian mythscape of turn-of-the-century beau mondes and their intertissued underbellies. From wherever your journey originates, you may find yourself in a gold mine; a vaudeville theater; a musty boxing ring; a bedroom ornamented with ghostly crinoline cages; a nocturnal Italianate garden; a resplendent ballroom (another of the original banking halls); a devilish mirrored sex dungeon; a devilish puppet storage facility; a devilish, Illuminati-coded pyramidic clubhouse; a devilish room of toy poodle statuettes (winking at the form Mephistopheles took in the Goethe remix); a ravey poppy farm and an apothecary selling its Conwell-branded yield. One hallway displays miniatures of Teotihuacán, Stonehenge, the Taj Mahal, and other man-made wonders in what feels like the happy place of a History Channel conspiracy theorist. Over the course of the night, anyone from Faustian twink Dorian Gray to ciphers modeled after Edwardian It girl Evelyn Nesbit and perverted Beaux-Arts architect Stanford White to Mephisto himself might tiptoe through these rooms, open some secret door, produce some damning evidentiary document or sneak a sip of Conwell’s Listerine-green opiate, and leave. When these characters encounter each other, they might catapult into Matrix-y dance battles in violent and libidinal scenelets, impressively maneuvering a cluttered obstacle course of antique tchotchkes and bicorned voyeurs.

On paper, Life and Trust’s strategic marriage of conspiratorial content and paranoiac form makes a credible case for its own brand of spectacular immersive entertainment. In practice, the liberal dusting of MacGuffins across what look like prototypes for a hundred early 2010s Williamsburg speakeasies left this viewer with the thinnest and most fragmentary of theatrical experiences. Maybe it was my fault: I did choose my own adventure, after all. Put off by the redundancy of the performers’ clandestine rummaging and by the prospect of sprinting up five flights of stairs in pursuit of my chosen personage–cum–personal trainer, I osmosed into empty rooms appointed with fin de siècle doodads; the greatest novelty of Life and Trust is getting to pretend New York still has a decent flea market.

Fearing my contrarian impulses had gotten in the way of my “immersion”— and comprehension—I went back to Life and Trust the following week. Obsessive and apparently deep-pocketed Redditors claiming to have attended the $160-plus performance multiple times suggested pursuing a single character rather than partaking in the narrative salmagundi. They singled out Mephisto, magnetically performed by Mike Tyus and identifiable by his heterochromatic contact lenses and wickedly snatched corsetry, as one to follow for a whole loop. (Each performer’s trajectory repeats twice over the course of three hours, before converging in a whole-ensemble climax that exhilaratingly gathers the entire audience in more conventional spectatorship and confirms: Regular old theater works for a reason.) Indeed, my repeat visit to Life and Trust was more rewarding, but it soon became clear that others had also consulted Reddit: Time and again, a swarm of bobbing, bonking plastic antlers occluded my view of Mephisto’s seductive skullduggery. Then the slippery demon would glide away, leaving a herd of sneakered audience members stampeding after him.

In the containment of a good stage set, nearly everything feels purposeful. Here, one becomes aware of the excess of unactivated objects and space—even with 250 scenes and a forty-member cast. Given how nonprofit theaters continue to suffer and drastically downsize seasons post-pandemic, this commercial model of captivating through sheer scale feels Marie Antoinette–ish even as it likens extravagance to devilry. Here, we can have our cake and eat the rich too.

As has often been said about Sleep No More and the ballooning self-doubt that accompanies one’s self-curated experience, FOMO is a money machine. In these pages, Greta Rainbow observed of Sleep No More that its producers “achieved something ingenious from a sales perspective. You can never get enough of the space.” My own second night in attendance, as I waited for the performance to begin, a woman in Conwell’s office confided to her fellow guests that this was also her second viewing. She gleefully told those near her, “Expect to come out of it knowing absolutely nothing.”

Created by British theater company Punchdrunk in 2003, Sleep No More traversed the theatrical hierarchy of taste—from a buzzy London experiment to a collaboration with the nonprofit A.R.T. to its commercial juggernaut incarnation in New York, produced by Emursive (which materialized for that purpose) as the most expensive off-Broadway show ever. (Life and Trust’s cost hasn’t been shared.) It was in Chelsea’s Hitchcockian “McKittrick Hotel” (in fact a warehouse formerly occupied by Junior Vasquez’s house music haunt the Sound Factory) that Sleep No More became such a shibboleth of mid-2010s New York as to rot public opinion and slide, in a matter of years, from a rhapsodically reviewed vanguard performance into a kitschy tourist trap. To state the obvious, Sleep No More was no longer the naughty underground secret its kinky, platypusy, mandatory-for-audience-members masks had once suggested. (For evidence of the further decline of the form, one need only recall the “Immersive Wonka Experience” fiasco of early 2024.)

As Steven Phillips-Horst wrote in the Guardian, in a scorched-earth piece indicative of the backlash, “to be ‘immersed’ means to be inside of something, but buildings already accomplish that, so we now understand ‘immersive’ to mean a building-sized gimmick.” Enter Life and Trust—which, in light of the 767-unit tower’s sale, just might be the world’s most elaborate open house.

Leaving “Conwell Tower,” I turned a corner and had a jump-scare encounter with a certain Fearless Girl, now safely sequestered from Charging Bull at the Broad Street entrance of the New York Stock Exchange. The remaindered social justice warrior princess—in fact a Trump-era viral marketing stunt by the asset management firm State Street Global Advisors—reminded me that what I’d just experienced was mere synecdoche, New York, and welcomed my damned soul back to the immersive inferno I call home.